


It's On The Door

by Crows_Feet



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: listen i just care about these kids a whole lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29500473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crows_Feet/pseuds/Crows_Feet
Summary: Two boys run from the mountains(or; insights in J. Farris (guide) and S. Grey (sage), told mostly in the right order)





	It's On The Door

Jack is born in the same place he lives the first fourteen years of his life. (The same place that generations of Farrises were born, and lived, and died, all without seeing the shape of the sky without branches cast against it. The Forest doesn’t like it when people leave). Jack is born aching, yearning, for Something, to Be Someone. Jack is not the kind of person that stays, as much as he wants to be.

~~Samuel~~ ~~Sanders~~ Grey is born in the most dangerous place he could be, to a mother who is wasting away, a sister who watches, and a father who doesn’t. He runs to his sister’s room when he’s scared, when he’s hurting, and tries not to think about how much she hurts other people. Grey buries his nose in books and recites facts like a distraction, like they’re the only thing keeping his head above water. He doesn’t let himself think about leaving until he’s already left, too scared that his father will catch on. His sister pushes him out the back door, backpack heavy across his shoulders, stomach heavier still. (He’ll be two valleys away before he lets himself cry.)

Grey hides himself from the world in much the same way that Jack doesn’t; buries himself under books and facts and ancient languages until that’s all that anybody sees. Jack collects titles and attention like he was born for it, like he barely notices the weight of them. He grows tall, and he smiles.

Two boys lie to get into the Academy. (Neither of them truly want to be Leaguesmen.)

Grey does not breathe easy in the way that Jack appears to; he does not sit comfortably in his bones. (Jack does not breathe easy either, but he’s much better at pretending). Grey will build walls of books and hostility and multi-syllable words in much the same way that Jack grins so wide that people don’t think to look deeper. At fourteen, someone will ask Grey where he wants to end up and he’ll say “The Library”.

(At fourteen, Jack will say “I’m going anywhere,” and fall into step next to a golden-haired girl).

Jack tumbles into brawls in Rivertown and Grey sighs put-upon sighs and pretends that he’s not interested in learning new kinds of stitches and splints (if only because Jack keeps coming back to their room progressively more injured and he might _bleed_ on some of Grey’s _books_ ). He talks theory at Jack and Rupert and Laney and will eventually join their little crew in the field. He’ll chase down a young seer and pretend his hands don’t shake as he tries to tell her mother how safe they aren’t. (It doesn’t matter how far you get from the mountains. Their shadow reaches a long way, and Grey is never going to be able to escape it).

Grey has his father’s hands, and he will never forgive himself for that. (He’ll press his fingers against drying ink and stare at his name smeared into his skin and pretend it makes a difference, that it covers the blood on his family’s hands.)

(“He grew up in that pit,” Sarge will say, months later in the mountains. “He’s a part of everything they’ve done.” Grey can change his name all he likes but he’ll never be able to escape that legacy.) (“He was a child,” Jack will say, because he knows the weight that Grey carries, and people don’t choose where they’re born.)

Grey grew up scared, and he grew up hiding.

He grew up pretending to be someone else to keep himself alive; to keep himself _safe_ in a place where he wasn’t, and that sort of thing leaves scars. Grey’s spent his life flinching back from the magic at his fingertips and pretending that he wasn’t scared to death of what it meant. (Jack grew up safe, and then he grew older fighting monsters, but he doesn’t expect that of anyone else.)

Grey will follow Jack home for the holidays in their second year, and try not to flinch as Farris brothers push Jack around. He won’t be able to understand how Jack, who promises to be scarier than everything else in a way that Grey pretends doesn’t _hurt_ , lets these boys jostle around him and threaten to push him into a river. (Grey is used to kind words masking antagonism, not the other way around).

Grey’s loyalty is quiet where Jack’s is loud; he’ll wait until they’re alone before asking Jack if he’s okay, telling him that he doesn’t have to put up with it. ( _You don’t have to let them hurt you_ , he won’t say. He’ll think he understands why Jack left home until they return to the mountains months later and the word Giantkiller is spilled into his perception of the older boy like blood).

Grey wanted to be safe. Jack wanted to be important.

(That’s not quite right- Grey wants to not be scared anymore. Jack wants to be enough to save people).

“ _Dad loves his son_ ,” Sandry would whisper late at night, when Grey was curled up next to her on the bed watching a storm rage out the window. “ _He loves his son. His son is not a mage”._ Grey couldn’t be scared, so he didn’t let himself be. (He thinks that maybe, for a while there, he stopped feeling altogether. It’s not until Rivertown, until Jack and Laney and Rupert find out about him, until he’s sitting in bed one night and realises that he’s out of the mountains, that he’s safe (or at the very least, saf _er_ ), that he starts to quietly hyperventilate. There’s a shift from the upper bunk and Jack’s face leans over the edge. “ _Grey_?” he says, and Grey chokes on something between a laugh and a sob because he got _out_.)

Some nights, in their little room in the Academy, Grey wakes to the sounds of Jack caught in a nightmare. “Jack,” he says into the darkness. “ _Jack_.” (He definitely doesn’t stretch up to give the mattress a bit of a kick from beneath, and if he does, it’s out of love.) When Jack jolts awake, gasping, a name half-formed in his mouth, Grey gives it a second before he says “Jack?” again quietly. (It’s their second year before Jack responds with anything other than a quick “ _It’s fine, Grey_ ,” and disappears for the rest of the night). Grey slides out of bed, edging around the books he’s carefully stacked on the mattress, and climbs up to look at Jack.

“I’m fine,” Jack says when Grey pointedly doesn’t say anything. (The time he wakes screaming, he’ll say quietly “I just. I lost someone,” when he’s managed to steady his breathing, and avoids meeting Grey’s eyes.) Grey would ask if he wants to talk about it but he already knows the answer to that question. Instead, he says, “Do you want to know about the ecological niche that freshwater snails fill in St John’s Port?” and talks until Jack’s hands stop shaking.

(By the time they’re back in the mountains together, following Laney and the slave-traders, they can reliably recognise the signs of each other’s nightmares. As the frequency of peaks that Grey recognises increases, so too do Jack’s nightmares, and more than once he hisses “Squirrel, wake up,” across the coals of the fire.) (Jack wakes him too, as they get deeper into the mountains, as Grey starts to hear his sister and father’s voices in his dreams.)

Once again, Grey finds himself pushing away fear.

(He’s not scared of Jack. He’s not.)

(Good little victims aren’t scared of heroes).

Grey could pull at the membrane between worlds and bring fire raining down at any moment, but he doesn’t. He buries his fists deep in pockets and his eyes deep in thick tomes and exudes _don’t look at me_ so effectively he sometimes thinks he might disappear. (Grey knows the power he has at his fingertips, but he wants to be invisible.)

In Rivertown, when demons start spilling through cracks, when Grey is pulled into the Elsewhere, he thinks _this was bound to happen._ He thinks _the things I could write about this._ He’s resigned himself to it; to being pulled apart by gold fire. Jack steps in after him, and thinks about an ink-smudged nose and the expectation of jagged skies, and he reaches out and takes Grey’s hand. He says, “Grey,” and Grey clutches at him as Jack pulls at the walls of the world.

(Grey falls to the ground in Rivertown gasping, newly strung back together and feeling like he’s just pulled through a bad elsewhere storm. He doesn’t let go of Jack’s hand until long after he’s blinked the last bits of gold from his vision.)

(For a long time afterwards, he will have dreams of the Elsewhere, and only some of them will be nightmares.)

Grey wants to go to the Library, but he’ll follow Jack Farris into the mountains first. (He goes for Laney, but he goes for Jack too). 

Back in Gravestown for the first time in two years, he’ll say “ _There isn’t really a safer way to travel north than with an ex-vigilante who thinks you’re his breakable little brother_ ” like Jack hasn’t felt like home for at least the past year. He’s never been close to anyone like this before – this little family of fighters who look at him and see _him,_ despite the power at his fingertips. They sit together in the evenings; Rupert pressing food into his hands and Laney talking Elsewhere theory at him and Jack grinning wide, and Grey’s hands forget to shake for a little bit.

(He breathes mountain air and it sits heavy in his chest.)

Mountain air tastes like grief and like home for Jack, too. He breathes deep in cold air and hears the wet thud of a bullet and the cold settles in his bones a little deeper. He’s been gone as long as Grey has. Both have been running, both felt cowardly, both wanted to go to make something better. Books are just as important as brawls, and Grey has never wanted to brawl. (Grey has always, always, just wanted to be safe, and books can be counted on for consistency in a way that people can’t.)

They follow Laney to the mountains, and both Jack and Grey pretend that they don’t have mixed feelings about being back.

Jack’s eyes drift to roads that he knows will lead to a bakery with yellow light spilling out the windows. He’s grown taller, since he left. Grown out, grown different. He wants to be able to fit back in where left off, but knows it doesn’t always work like that.

(He’s grown so much since he left the Forest, and somehow everything there is so similar and so different at the same time.) (We grow up and out, and so do our homes, and sometimes those don’t happen in the same direction.)

A six-year-old girl Laney should have had the chance to know throws herself into Jack’s arms and he aches to his bones as a gunshot echoes in the back of his head. Laney goes still, goes silent, _goes_ , and Jack feels sick to his stomach. He knows he’s screwed up (he wishes he could stop screwing up, he wants to save people but can’t stop hurting them). He buries his hands in soapy water and scrubs dishes until his hands are growing raw and wrinkled with water, and the Dragon Slayer steps into the bakery.

Jack is so much taller. (He wants to tuck himself under George’s armpit the way he used to before he left, and for her to lean her head on his. He wants things to be the same, but they’re not. Nothing is the same and the butter dish has moved since he was last here, and he feels like he’s falling down a mountainside, out of control.)

Jack goes north with his ~~little brother~~ roommate and watches Grey’s shoulders start to hunch a little more by the day. (There’s nothing tangible to put himself between though, no way to protect Grey from whatever is haunting him, and Jack has never dealt well with feeling useless.)

Jack was born itching to help, to feel useful, to do something – _anything_. He falls into loyalty around people destined to burn out, and he carries the weight of their losses the way George carries her village. ( _“Jack would burn everything,”_ his mother will tell Grey one evening when she thinks her seventh son can’t hear her, “ _If he thought it was the right thing to do_.”)

Jack wants to learn how to save people. (How to be good enough). One day he’ll learn about the cloak of gold protecting him, of the way that dragons call him ‘Red Hand Boy’ and the weight of his friends’ deaths will eat away at him like a festering wound. (Jack wants to protect people, and he hates the Luck that keeps him safe while his friends risk their lives. It’s a relief when it’s gone). They reach Challenge and Jack falls into place looking after the sick and injured, and pretends it is enough to satiate his need to save people. Rupert sits quietly by the bedside of mages leaking gold and saves them with quiet reverence, and Jack takes bedpans out the back to scrub.

It's enough, he tells himself. This is where they need you, so it’s enough.

Then they lose Rupert, and Jack isn’t enough to bring him home.

In St John’s Port, Jack and Grey share a little two-bedroom apartment, and their names aren’t on the door but it’s theirs. There’s tea in the back of the cupboard for Elsewhere storms, and all of them know they’re just camping out there for as long as it takes.

(To find Rupert. To bring him home).

They carry his absence with them, but there is work to do. (Jack always did better when there was something tangible in his hands). He goes north with Laney, searches slavers’ hideouts for a long-nosed boy. Jack expects him around every corner, every door they have to unlock. (It hurts, every time that he isn’t there.)

Jack follows Laney to Thorne’s quiet little branch and they scheme quietly in the evenings. He walks up to a door he hasn’t tried yet and when it opens –

Jack thinks Bea would tell him he’s over-exerting himself. (He probably is, and he knows this, but he doesn’t know how else to be). Grey watches him over the top of his book at breakfast and categorises the bags under his eyes in much the same way that George does, then slides the bowl of sugar across the table before Jack can ask for it.

Grey goes to the Library, and it is where he wants to be, but it also isn’t at the same time. He can’t help but feel that this, too, is temporary. Jack stays late at work with Laney and Grey walks back to their apartment by himself, sits on the couch facing the front door with a book propped open in his lap.

(When Jack comes home, Grey is asleep, and Jack goes to get the younger boy’s blanket to spread over him on the couch).

George pulls him down to work at the soup kitchen and puts things in his hands he can use to help people. She’s known him long enough to know when he’s falling apart at the seams. Jack smiles wide, and he is so, so tired.

(They attend a funeral, before trekking down to St John’s Port. _He’s not dead_ , Jack wants to say, but he doesn’t. He stands next to Laney and Grey, and Grey presses a shoulder against Jack’s side. There is something hot and sharp in the back of Jack’s throat, and he says nothing as a heroes badge is buried in cold soil.)

When they finally find Rupert, in a hallway with the seeress, Jack wants to throw his arms around him, but there isn’t time. Grey stands just behind Rupert with Laney, hands full of gold and face pale. (When Grey and Laney had found them, Cassandra tells Laney his _name_ just to watch the words hurt her _,_ and Grey goes still and shaky. He doesn’t know where he stands here, between one family and another, and it makes his chest goes tight).

(Thorne confronts them, and Grey brings fire raining down with shaking hands, and it still isn’t enough.)

They run, and go out through a window, and Jack feels a bullet punch through his calf. He limps the rest of the way to the truck, breaths ragged, but the bullet is in his leg instead of someone else’s throat, so its hot pain is almost welcome. Everyone is here; everyone is alive, and he could sob with the relief of it.

(“That’s really your name?” says Laney, like Grey hasn’t been lying to her face, to all of them. Rupert shrugs like this isn’t devastating news that could pull their little family apart, like Grey isn’t awful for hiding this from them, like- Grey buries his fists in his pockets and tries to ignore the thought. He is all too used to family being conditional.)

(We can choose our names, but not where we come from, not the history that lurks at our backs. In the mountains, before they lost him, Rupert had asked _Do you want me to call you Sam?_ and Grey had scuffed his shoes on dusty ground and said _No._ We come with history, with backstory and hurts, but we also come with futures.)

“Got any more murderous relatives I need to bring home to my mom?” Rupert says. 

“No,” says Grey, quiet, like it hurts less than it does. “Laney shot him.”

Rupert has been gone a long time, and Grey is a little bit taller and a little bit gaunter, and a cousin of his own curse is lurking in his injured friend, so his usual walls are a little lower than usual. He holds onto Jack’s leg, onto the spell he wrote before he knew how such things could be used to hurt, and doesn’t let himself think about what he’ll do if Jack dies.

“He wasn’t much of a dad anyhow,” he says, and it’s true, but saying the words aloud still hurt. Jack twitches under his hands, mumbles something about a seatbelt, and a little bit of the emptiness inside Grey eases. (Even injured, Jack wants to help people. Grey is still so young, and Jack knows what it is to have the world on your shoulders.)

They reach Rivertown, and Jack wakes up with fewer feet than before. (He wakes up, and Grey isn’t there). He’s up before he should be, already adjusting, adapting, trying to get something tangible in his hands he can use to help someone.

He falls into fights again, now with the solid weight of crutches under his armpits, same old sword ready in his hand. He picks up shifts at the watchtowers and bothers Sally-Anne into letting him help around the shop, and watches the way Grey fits so easily at the side of the seeress from across the table. Jack doesn’t think about the way that Grey fit at his elbow in much the same way. (Grey is shrinking in on himself again these days, and Jack doesn’t know how to help).

Jack sits still long enough for the new prosthetic to be fitted then goes upstairs to descale fish until Sally-Anne shoos him away to a table to eat something. He washes dishes and picks up sentry shifts and watches the way Grey looks at his sister. He learns to walk again in a basement and pretends his leg doesn’t ache. Sez takes him around town to visit amputees and Jack understands the kindness in that action.

(“Sez knows everyone,” says Sally-Anne’s brother. “And she makes sure you know everyone you need to”. Jack thinks about Bea, about the networks sneaking mages out of the mountains, about how she knows every face she has ever smuggled away from the slavers, and he nods.)

Leaf falls into a chair across from Grey and asks about Jack, says “You’re his best friend,” and Grey looks down into his plate of chips. He thinks about The First Day, the first real day of their study group, in this shop, eating chips next to Jack, and shrugs. He thinks about Squirrel, about their room at the Academy, the apartment in St John’s Port, about Jack promising to be scarier than the things Grey is afraid of. “He’s sad,” he says, because he’s been around Jack long enough to recognise when his smiles are hiding grief, and Grey pretends it doesn’t feel like his fault. “And he’s tired. But he’s better when he has stuff to do.”

Anyone who spends enough time with Jack knows that he isn’t good at staying still, that he needs something in his hands to keep him distracted enough to focus, and Grey has sat through enough lectures at the Academy with him to be intimately familiar with these character traits. But he also knows that the best thing to put in Jack’s hands is a way to help someone.

(Grey just doesn’t know what to hand him now. He knows that Jack wants to fix him, he just doesn’t think that the older boy can.) (Grey also isn’t sure that he’s worth saving)

The first time they properly talk again after Jack loses his leg, Grey brings a board game down to the infirmary and sits cross-legged on the end of the bed. Grey talks without looking at Jack, and Jack understands the need for distractions during hard conversations, so he starts moving stones across the board. Grey tells him about running from Challenge, about his sister, about being scared.

“I left, too,” says Jack. “I ran. People do that.”

“I don’t want to run,” says Grey, and it’s not a lie. Grey has spent a lot of his life scared, and he’s _tired_. (Jack has spent most of his life running, and he’s tired too).

Jack still wears the old leather jacket from his time in the mountains. Laney still wears her Academy Issued one, and Rupert has a collection of knitted jumpers that Sez seemed to have stashed away somewhere, but Grey doesn’t wear anyone’s colours. 

(One night when he thinks Grey is asleep, Jack will ask the seeress if she knew they’d roomed together for two years. “Kid’s like my little brother,” he says. “He’s not,” says Sandry, “yours.” Jack knows that Grey isn’t his but he also doesn’t think he’s Cassandra’s.) (People should pick their own loyalties, and Jack doesn’t want to make Grey choose between two kinds of family).

“She would never have hurt _you_ , pip,” Jack tells Grey quietly after the battle of Driftwood Island, because the seeress cares about her breakable little brother. “But that’s all.” She’s hurt Jack, and she’s hurt his friends, and she’s the reason Liam will never go home or see Laney shoot a gun, and Cassandra Graves is trying not to hurt her little brother, but outside of family is where she draws the line.

Grey pours magic into wards in the walls of a busy fish shop, and tries not to shrink under the sudden gaze of everyone in the room as he is bathed in gold light. He goes back to the table and sits tucked next to Jack. Gloria stares at him, and Grey folds his arms on the table and lies his head down on them. He can see what is left of Jack’s leg under the table.

_I’m not a mage,_ he thinks. _I’m a sage._

(It’s what was on the door, after all.)

When Wren throws a bag of elsewhere stones to the foot of Grey’s bed so she can threaten his sister, Grey does not feel like a sage. He hyperventilates into a blanket, and feels like he’s back in the mountains, and nobody comes to save him. (Grey is getting used to having to save himself.) Wren spits out the horrors his family has done, and his sister sits on her bed, merciless, and Grey isn’t sure Sandry thinks she’s done anything wrong. He spent his time in the mountains surviving, and maybe his sister did too, but somewhere along the way she forgot how to be a person.

Wren finally leaves and Cassandra kicks the elsewhere stones away across the floor. Grey gasps huge, sobbing breaths into his blanket until he can breathe again, and doesn’t meet his sister’s eyes. (Later, Wren will find him keeping Elaine company and try to reach out to him, but Grey is so very good at running away by now.)

(When Jack sees this, he’ll let Grey run; let him go out into the streets of Rivertown alone because that’s what he needs, but keeps his hands ready in case Grey needs somewhere to fall later.)

Jack teaches classes in Rivertown on how to fight, and how to do it _right_. They move out of Sally-Anne’s and into a warehouse with Leaf and Red where sheets are strung up as walls. Laney’s bedroll is rolled up next to his, and the stitching makes him nostalgic for sharp grey peaks and yellow bakery windows. When Jack wakes up in the night, Grey’s soft snore comes from next to him. (Jack rolls onto his back and stares up at their sheet walls and listens to the familiar sounds of Grey sleeping in the darkness. He wonders who sleeps in their room at the Academy now, and what they do with old signs.)

In a room in Rivertown, the seeress will spread parts of old machines Grey recognises across a bed cover, and say “It’s what father would want.” Grey stares at her, his sister who can’t escape their family’s history any more than he can, and doesn’t even seem to want to. “He’s dead,” says ~~Sam~~ ~~Sanders~~ Grey. “He’s gone. Who cares about what he would’ve wanted.”

~~The seeress~~ ~~Cassandra~~ ~~Sandry~~ His sister looks back at him, and Grey isn’t sure if either of them will ever be free of their father. (In a room upstairs, Grey and Laney have been putting together a machine Cassandra will recognise from the mountains, because Samuel Graves is tired of running and Laney Jones is stubborn enough and brilliant enough to make things better.)

_“I was safe,”_ Grey says that evening in a room with sheets for walls and no door to write their names on. _“I am always safe, but everyone hates her for not being brave enough and I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t-“_ and Jack thinks about Grey when he first arrived at the Academy, tiny and taciturn and haunted by the mountains.

Grey turns to Jack and he’s still just a kid, and he’s hurting, and Jack says _“But you weren’t safe, Grey.”_ Because he wasn’t. Sarge had said it months ago; Grey grew up in the most dangerous place he could have. He got himself out alone, because nobody came to save him, because his family were hurting him even if they didn’t realise it. (Jack hadn’t been safe at fourteen, either; he had been fighting monsters, but even if he hadn’t understood the long term effects of doing that, it had been something he had chosen.)

Grey presses his shaking form into Jack’s shoulder, and Jack leans down to curl around him.

The mountains come calling Jack. (That’s a lie; Thorne comes calling, comes threatening, comes with weapons trained on Jack and Laney’s family). Jack runs, but this time he is running towards something instead of away. Jack runs to the mountains and he doesn’t run alone, and by the time they get there the saving has already been done. The bakery burns, and so too does Thorne. Jack thinks about the days and nights he’s spent in that bakery, about Liam and the smell of baking bread, and he puts his arms around Bea because it was her home first, her home last. She leans into the gesture and they watch the fire climb higher, dragons pressed in close at their sides. They go back to Rivertown, and Jack climbs up to his sentry post and watches the wall.

(The dragons call Jack Farris _red hand boy_ , but it’s because he heals, not because he hurts.)

Grey steals Jack’s prosthetic every so often for weeks after it is first fitted, running magic over it and settling spells in the leather to make it fit more easily; more soundly. (Jack’s penchant for looking after his friends though kind, tangible actions is rubbing off on him, and he wants to help). 

In the battle of Driftwood Island, when Jack lets the seeress leave through a crack in the wall, that is a sort of kindness too. A kindness to her; to Grey; Jack isn’t sure. Maybe it’s the selfish kind; the kind that doesn’t want to see her in the same place as his friends when she’s hurt so many people. He doesn’t forgive her, but he also doesn’t stop her ducking out through the hole in the wall. The woman Jack has been fighting against since he first learnt how to fight leaves, and Jack doesn’t watch her go.

After the battle, Grey pours magic into the inured. Jack nags him into taking the occasional nap, and Grey grumbles good naturedly back at him. (Grey moves into their corner of the warehouse and piles his blankets next to Jack’s bedroll, and Jack takes him around to meet the neighbours.)

Grey takes charge of the Academy library, and Jack has never seen his eyes so bright.

The bedroom door that Jack used to tap for good luck at the Academy was blown off it’s hinges in the fight. Jack looks into the room, strewn with things that aren’t his or Grey’s, that doesn’t have his name on the door anymore. His presses five toes and one prosthetic firmly into the ground, makes a note of what is broken for Rupert, and keeps walking.

(They go south, to Laney’s family, and Jack steps forward in desert sand to tell Liam’s mother about the stories of the Pied Piper in the mountains. It’s still hard, talking about this, but he’s trying).

Back in Rivertown, Grey grins wide at them from behind a pile of books, and Jack almost doesn’t recognise the boy whose dorm room he walked into those years ago. The younger boy takes them around the library, cheerfully arguing with George about book placement and gesticulating wildly with an enthusiasm that makes Jack grin. This is not a kid who needs saving anymore. (And either way, Jack is learning how to let people save themselves).

George goes back to the University to get her degree, and Jack promises to meet her someplace new. (He misses her, but she is off saving herself, and he trusts her to come back. For maybe the first time in his life, Jack is the kind of person who stays).

He goes up to Leaf and Red’s place and sleeps on the couch outside the spare room Grey’s been occupying whilst they were in the desert, and stares at the ceiling. Through the doorway to Grey’s room, which stands cracked slightly open, he can hear Grey’s soft, familiar snores as he falls asleep.

(Once upon a mountain, two boys fought different kinds of monsters in the best ways they knew how, and two boys left. (It takes a long to outrun the shadow of the mountains, but they manage)).

(Once upon a story, J Farris and S Grey arrived in Rivertown, and their names were written on the same door). 


End file.
